The Earth Diary of Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill
by Jazerus
Summary: Aximili isn't certain he likes these humans as much as his brother did...but for Elfangor's sake, he's willing to try to understand.
1. Chapter 1

My name is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. If you are reading this, you surely know of me. However, in leaving this _Hirac Delest_ , I hope to explain my actions during the invasion of Earth, in full - to reveal the truth to my people. The Directorate likely do not wish for you to know this story, but it must be told. The full magnitude of our arrogance and neglect must be appreciated, and corrected; the resourceful and intuitive nature of the humans must be understood. Their will to defend their world must be known, and respected.

I am the brother of War-Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, the celebrated hero of our people. They say that I am a stain upon Elfangor's honor. Judge for yourself.


	2. Chapter 2

‹ _Our stay on Yers has been the most exciting time of my life. My work in integrating the native species of this world - the Yeerks - into the galactic community has been progressing apace with their eagerness to learn, which is boundless. In time, our races shall be brothers among the stars, true partners to a degree no other known species have achieved._ › - The Secret Diary of Prince Seerow-Shamtul-Iskillion

* * *

‹I am uncertain how to proceed. These humans are young. From unclear recollections of school assignments on this primitive - and yet crucial - species, as well as clear memories of my long extracurricular education under my brother, I know their basic biology and development well enough to notice this. Truly, too young, though we are roughly the same age - taking into account the differences in maturation rate and education between our species, they are far less prepared for war than I.›

‹And yet...Elfangor emphasized the extraordinary resourcefulness of the human youth in our lessons. Lacking the intensive training of an Andalite, humans are nevertheless naturally gifted innovators in a way that has eternally eluded us, and young humans are perhaps the most adaptable group in the known galaxy. Though he could never have known I would be in this situation, I am already grateful for his insistence on the importance of studying information most warriors disregard as worthless.›

‹Hey, Ax-man!› I heard in the speech of my people. I was unsure of which of my new...companions? comrades? was speaking, but I suspected it was Marco from the form of address, which sent a tingle of informality through my language centers, as well as...an equation of myself with a male human?

Encouraging, but confusing in a way that was distinctly foreign. I had spoken with aliens before - mostly Skrit Na, truthfully - and our translator chips have never been able to fully unravel the layers of implication in spoken language in such a way that it bears any true resemblance to thought-speech between two Andalites. It is...bare, bland, pragmatic. Cold, unless you take the time to learn vocal cues and body language, and even then, still imperfect. The thought-speech of a human, in contrast, was rich with implication and underlying emotion, a sea of foreign thought-patterns and links between concepts that an Andalite would never conceive of.

‹Yes?› I replied, distracted from my diary entry. I had been standing in my scoop - so recently constructed that the sap was still drying within the _anskatil_ overhead - as I dictated the entry, carefully crafting those basic amenities of a scoop which did not require technology with my hands and tail-blade. I emerged from the scoop at Marco's greeting.

‹Jake's called a meeting at Cassie's barn, which is our usual meeting place, by the way,› Marco said, fluttering down into the clearing as a creature similar to a _kafit_ , some species of "bird", which I had already noticed Earth possessed a great variety of.

‹Very well. I remember the way; I shall be there shortly.› I replied, already galloping at a comfortable pace within seconds. I did not yet know how active these Animorphs were in their fight against the Yeerks, and while I had been rescued only a day before, I felt ready once more to fight the enemy.

‹You Andalite fellas can move pretty quick, huh?› I heard Marco say behind me, faintly.

Unfortunately, my thought-speech range has never been notable, so I could not reply.

"Look at yourself, Cassie. Are you really planning to go to the mall in **that**?" I heard Rachel say as I walked up to the human structure. I had already morphed into a human a short distance away - one of the few things I fully understood about the situation of my new allies was that secrecy was paramount. Each of them maintained a cover of perfect normality, while in the darkness they fought the enemy.

"It'll be fine, Rachel! We have a few more important things to worry about, don't you think?" Logically, that would be Cassie, though I wasn't certain. Alien voices when the speaker is hidden from view are...challenging to identify.

"I'm just saying, the horse crap look still isn't the most fashionable thing around."

"I have arrived, Prince Jake," I said as I approached the group. Cassie, who is of medium height for a young human with darker skin and hair than the others, appeared to be tending to injured animals - the true purpose of the "barn", I believe - while Prince Jake assisted and Rachel observed. Prince Jake and Rachel are cousins, light-skinned with yellow hair and both rather tall.

"Hey, Ax. Have a seat and we'll wait for the others," Prince Jake said, motioning to a rectangular bale of plant material. Somewhat unsteadily, I walked to the bale and sat upon it. Human locomotion is not awkward - not nearly so much as one might expect - but getting used to the morph of any sentient species which relies on education rather than instinct is difficult when it is considerably different from one's natural form.

Marco and Tobias arrived shortly after. I paid close attention to the conversation of my comrades in the interim, but truly understood little; human speech is startlingly irregular, and my translator chip can only slowly decipher the more metaphorical and vernacular constructions.

Marco is quite short, with dark hair and a skin color that is of a shade between that of Cassie and that of the others. Tobias, unfortunately, is a _nothlit_ , though stuck in a rather capable form - that of another bird.

"Alright, now that we're all here, let's get to business," Prince Jake said, moving away from the caged animals as Cassie finished her work.

"Business?" I inquired.

"Yeah, Ax-man. See, we've been flying pretty blind so far in this fight, and even though we're just a bunch of idiotic kids with a death wish, we've managed to do okay so far. Not even a missing limb yet," Marco said. "But our luck isn't going to hold forever. We have to know more about all of this intergalactic war stuff if we're going to even be able to think about living through it."

I found his casual reference to his fellow Animorphs becoming _vecols_ crass, but understood his logic. Elfangor doubtless had too little time to prepare these children for their role in the war - no short amount of time could have been enough to fully explain the enemy, or the Andalites, even setting aside the roles of the many other minor players in our galaxy-spanning conflict.

"I see. How may I assist you?" I replied. There are a few things that are truly against the laws of Andal to reveal to any other species, a few more that are not to be spoken of to non-spacefaring races, and an unimaginable variety of things that are considered culturally taboo to discuss with aliens, such as the fact that our homeworld's name is Andal. I grew up firmly educated in the norms and mores of Andalite spacefaring by my parents, distant kin of Prince Seerow that we are, but my brother had always been more open-minded, perhaps due to his extensive travel and exposure to aliens during the war.

I hold the views of my parents in high regard, but the hard realities of war were never far from the surface of Elfangor's philosophy, and, I felt, this situation was certainly one of those hard realities. Stranded on an alien planet, one that I knew more than most about, I nevertheless was almost entirely dependent on the native species for support. I judged that the demise of the Yeerk Empire was more pressing than the propriety and secrecy so highly valued by our leaders. As always, I followed Elfangor.

‹How about we start with the basics? Where are Andalites from, where are Yeerks from, why did the war begin?› Tobias suggested, fixing his rather fierce predator's gaze upon me from above. I met it briefly, some human instinct urging me to be wary, though I ignored it, and then turned my eyes to Prince Jake. Frissons of curiosity, frustration, and military strategy underlaid Tobias's questions, a feeling surprisingly similar to that of an Andalite dropped into an unknown situation in war, but with more emphasis on understanding in order to generate new tactics and less on following established procedure.

‹I would prefer to answer in thought-speech, if you do not mind. My command of your language is still somewhat...basic, while an Andalite thought-speaking is capable of clear communication of meaning with any sentient organism,› I said, hesitantly. None of the Animorphs objected, and so I proceeded.

‹Andalites are natives of the planet Andal, which is much like Earth. Andal is approximately 220 _escals_ from Earth, but merely 50 _escals_ from Yers, the homeworld of the Yeerks.›

"Escals?" Rachel said, in a tone that apparently indicated confusion.

‹A measurement related to the amount of distance traversed by light in a single Andalite year. I shall provide equivalents once I have studied Earth's scientific terms. In any case...the beginning of the war is a complicated story. The Yeerks have not been a spacefaring race for long, merely 65 or so Andalite years. We discovered them subsisting in the muck - literally and figuratively. Yers is not a kind world, utterly inhospitable to all life except that which evolved there. Kandros, its sun, emits unusual radiation which harms Andalite genetic material, a nucleic acid similar to your DNA, but which the stability of Yeerk genetic material depends upon, as it has an unusual triple-helix structure. This is the source of their dependence upon the Kandrona.›

The humans sat, uncharacteristically quiet. I suspected that I was broadcasting my solemnity.

‹A team of Andalite xenobiologists was sent to Yers 93 Andalite years ago, to study the life there due to its unusual biochemistry. To their surprise, they discovered a sentient species - the Yeerks. At first appearing to be small creatures with some similarity to humans, but much furrier, the Yeerks gradually revealed their true nature as symbiotes, controlling the barely-sentient Gedd species. To xenobiologists, this was tremendously exciting - many sent articles back to the homeworld detailing the fascinating co-evolution of the Yeerk and the Gedd, the Yeerk's entire body acting as a brain component of the Gedd to provide higher brain function to an otherwise utterly incapable species.›

"Fascinating? I may not have understood all of the biology stuff, but these scientists sound kind of sick," Prince Jake said, turning slightly red. I believed that this indicated anger.

‹In retrospect, it does appear that way. Many Andalites now share your opinion, though it was merely an interesting news item at the time.›

"If you can block out the fact that we're talking about Yeerks, though...I think I can understand. Sometimes, biology is creepy, but that doesn't make it wrong," Cassie said. Cassie has great affinity for nature and a more thorough understanding of biology than the others, or so the humans say.

‹Yes. I do, as well. And, truly, in this form, the Yeerks were doing no harm; Gedds are indeed nearly helpless in the hostile ecosystem of Yers without Yeerk...assistance and naturally seek out Yeerk pools when uncontrolled, no matter how subjectively distasteful we find this arrangement. And so the xenobiologists treated the Yeerk-Gedd relationship as a complicated biological system, just more proof of evolution's capacity to produce incredible diversity but ultimately rather unimportant. This went well for a time, but the Yeerks grew curious about, and then covetous of, our knowledge and technology. This was not unforeseen, but a carefully planned uplifting process had been committed to, with the Yeerks projected to join us among the stars after perhaps 200 Andalite years of careful guidance. The Yeerks were not so patient.›

"So, the cavemen killed the scientists and stole their stuff? Oh man, we're being invaded by the Planet of the Apes!" Marco said. My translator chip buzzed within the lobes of my brain stored in Zero-space, protesting with a wordless error message that his statement made no sense. My confusion must have shown, as Tobias repeated Marco's statement...I think. The implications, in any case.

‹Ah, yes. Essentially. One of the xenobiologists, Prince Seerow, gave the Yeerks a taste for spaceflight by taking a number of Vissers - the traditional leaders of each pool - on tours of the Kandros system. Unbeknownst to his fellow Andalites, Seerow shared a number of devices - small, tremendously useful conveniences, nothing truly threatening in themselves. The Yeerks, in time, came to understand Andalite technology well enough to use our data storage devices...and, thinking it harmless, Prince Seerow had keyed a few Gedd bodies into his personal computer so that the Yeerks could play educational games on relatively primitive topics. It was not harmless. The current spacefaring breed of Yeerks harvested all of the data from the local network under the guise of playing a game before killing the research team, stealing their ships, stuffing as many Yeerks from as many pools as possible into their holds, and leaving Yers forever. Prince Seerow was taken for a time, infested and used to interface with Andalite computers, drained of his extensive scientific knowledge, before being dumped outside of an Andalite colony...in gratitude for his help, they say. As for the dependence on the rays of Kandros, the Kandrona had been developed to help Yeerks survive during Yers's equivalent of winter, when the rays of Kandros are thin and many primitive Yeerks starve; but when connected to a sufficient power source, such as a ship's reactor, this same technology was capable of breaking their dependence on their home sun entirely.› I turned my only two eyes - it is odd, not having stalks - downward, in shame, and then up, in anger.

I felt exhausted. The tale of Seerow's kindness is a hard one for any Andalite to tell, even an unconventional Andalite. Especially to aliens.

"So, wait. The Andalites are the reason Earth is being invaded in the first place? The reason all of these other aliens - the Hork-Bajir, the Taxxons - are enslaved? And you're just letting us fend for ourselves?" Rachel asked, rather aggressively.

‹Yes.›

I believe my bluntness shocked them into silence.

‹It is more complicated than that, but yes, you are correct. Seerow's kindness is the great shame of our species, one borne by every Andalite at the time and since. Our excitement and arrogance overrode our sense of safety and our responsibility to understand the species we sought to uplift, leading to galactic catastrophe. For that is what the Yeerks are - while we have stood against them ever since, every victory for the Yeerks swells their numbers tremendously, while ours merely deplete our reserves. We can only stand against them in a very limited capacity, even for a planet as vital as Earth. They are a sentient plague which has swept known space, primitives who stole spaceflight before they developed civilization. While the Yeerk Empire has the outward appearance of a sovereign state, they have only scant practice at living in a united society of more than a few thousand individual Yeerks and thus remain rather prone to infighting; one of our few advantages over them.› Instinctively, I kicked at the ground in contempt.

Several questions came at once.

‹Infighting? The Yeerks are too busy blasting each other?› Tobias.

"As vital as Earth? What do you mean?" Cassie.

"So we're screwed?" Marco.

‹The Yeerks fight often amongst themselves. There is fierce competition for the offices of Visser and Sub-Visser. The pools are ranked by a combination of size and importance, and a Visser controls each; unlike the sovereign Vissers of old, they are ranked in a hierarchy and may be promoted, but only when there is a vacancy above them in the hierarchy. As a result, the life expectancy of an individual Visser is rather short, and Yeerk military operations are often comically inefficient...but this rarely matters in the long term when they can rely on secrecy and numbers. However, Yeerk invasions progress rather slowly as a result.›

‹Earth is vital for a number of reasons. That is why I am sharing information with you at a level most of my fellow Andalites would condemn me for in the strongest terms, protesting that I am breaking the law of Seerow's Kindness.›

"Oh boy, the Prime Directive. I was wondering when that would show up," said Marco, leaning his torso forward - indicating interest?

"Prime Directive?" Another combination of words that made sense separately but which my translator could not make sense of together.

"It's an idea from our science fiction about first contact with primitive species. That they should be left alone to develop naturally, both because it's the right thing to do and because they could be dangerous," Cassie explained. How interesting. Humans clearly have a great capacity for accurate imagination; we only began thinking of such things when our first potential first contact actually occurred.

‹Ah. Yes. In any case, while the Directorate would cut off my tail for informing you of this...Earth has the highest sentient population of any planet in the known galaxy. By orders of magnitude.›

"Wait, what? Don't you aliens have super-advanced space medicines and stuff? How can we be at the top?" Rachel said, seeming rather surprised.

‹Our medical technology is beyond yours. Birth rate, however, is very difficult to adjust in Andalites; without going into excessive detail, the pregnancy of a female Andalite is a difficult trial which most are not eager to repeat. I am somewhat unusual as a second son, and likely would not have been born without the wartime policies which encourage Andalite couples to continue having children after their first.› Elfangor enjoyed telling me of his morning vigils over the wish-flower my parents sent him on his first deployment, representing my impending birth. Common enough, now, but in his youth it was a great honor.

‹Most other species do not have the level of medical technology needed for such adjustments, and have a similarly slow natural rate of population growth, if not even slower. The Yeerks, of course, will eventually outbreed us all if left alone.›

"And the one thing that would give them an absolutely unbeatable edge would be us. With us, it's Yeerks six billion, Andalites...a lot less," Prince Jake said, quite seriously.

‹Yes. Earth is intentionally portrayed to most Andalites and the galaxy at large as an uninteresting, distant, and dangerous backwater, filled with warlike primitives and dangerous creatures.› Most of the humans scoffed at this; Cassie and Marco, however, appeared unsurprised.

‹Details such as the human population are deliberately left at the estimates we made approximately 300 Andalite years ago, when you were less unusual, though still numerous. Unfortunately, the Yeerks have discovered this deception and have made Earth a priority target in the war, along with Leera, whose inhabitants are notable for their Andalite-like mental projection abilities.› Either planet falling would doom the war effort. The Directorate seem unwilling to face this fact and squander our ships on the blockade of Yers, as if any Yeerk would wish to rescue his primitive relations rather than breeding more Yeerks in space. It is the height of foolishness, as Elfangor often said.

‹You've been observing us that long?› Tobias said. ‹Why'd you make contact with the Yeerks and not with us?› A keen note of sadness pervaded this question, one speaking of opportunities lost.

‹We encountered the Yeerks before we knew they were sentient; the _hoober_ was out of the _escanfitil_ patch. You, on the other hand, were quite obviously sentient from casual observation; at the time, you used engines powered by steam for industrial tasks and transportation. Even before Seerow, we followed a 'Prime Directive', and resolved to simply keep an eye on you, checking back in every twenty years or so to ensure no outside threats would interfere with your development. Unfortunately, aside from Elfangor, no Andalite has visited this star system for more than a few hours in many decades, until now. The war has distracted us, and you are far away from Andal. Only Elfangor and his superiors, the highest leaders of our people, understand the full scope of your population and advancement, and only Elfangor has ever taken the threat of the Yeerks discovering the truth about humans seriously.›

* * *

 **Glossary**

 _anskatil_ \- shelter-beams, for a scoop.

 _escal_ \- approximately 0.66 lightyears, as the Andal year is roughly 2/3 as long as an Earth year.

 _escanfitil_ \- a fern-like plant native to the northern continent of Andal; _anskatil_ were once thatched over with dried _escanfitil_ before synthetic scoop-coverings were invented.

 _hoober_ \- a small, squishy animal from Andal, often featured in children's tales.

 _kafit_ \- a four-winged flying animal from Andal, the dominant aerial predator; a common first morph for Andalite _aristh_ s _._

 _nothlit_ \- a being whose original bio-pattern has fragmented beyond repair within Zero-space; _nothlits_ are still connected to the displaced matter of their original body, allowing them to continue to think with their original brain, but current _Escafil_ technology cannot reconstitute the body correctly in real-space once sufficient fragmentation has occurred.

* * *

A/N: Hello! I hope you've enjoyed the story so far. This fic is born out of a lot of things - mostly, a desire to expand upon the rather scant backstory of the Andalites and Yeerks, as well as their societies and interactions, and to make Ax a more serious and capable person. This fic is intended to be AU with only a single point of divergence (though with a few retcons to make things make more logical sense, such as the infestation of Prince Seerow), which is that the timeline has been stretched 2 Earth years because the Ellimist replaced Elfangor into the timeline earlier. Instead of popping out of being Alan Fangor straight into a short tour of duty in the war and then dying, Elfangor had time to get to know Ax and teach him the things that only he knows. Elfangor took leave whenever he could, partially to teach Ax about the galaxy and the secret realities of the war that the Andalite leadership is unwilling to face directly. As a result, Ax is less of an immature cadet who slept through class and more of a full warrior; one with an agenda inherited from Elfangor. The Animorphs are also two years older due to the timeline shift, and so they're taking it all a little more seriously from the start. The conceit of Animorphs was that it was happening 'right now', which for the publication date of book 1 would be 1996, so this is beginning in 1998 instead.

Also important is the nature of thought-speech. In book 1, the Animorphs feel Elfangor's emotions when he speaks to them. In pretty much all other cases, thought-speech is just regular speech without sound, which I think is a lot less interesting than the original concept. So, Ax gets much more than what is stated out of thought-speech, unless the speaker is carefully controlling their thoughts and emotions. The Animorphs think of it as regular speech and so don't pick up that kind of thing from each other for the most part, though they are unconsciously communicating tone of voice and other vocal details with this ability, as thought-speech has no "native support" for the quirks of verbal communication.


End file.
